Aldehydes are useful compounds as starting materials for chemical reaction and fragrance materials. Especially, aliphatic aldehydes having a specific molecular weight are useful as fragrance materials by themselves, and further used as starting materials for derivatives having different fragrance notes.
As methods for producing aldehydes, conventionally, dehydrogenation, oxidation reaction and the like that use alcohol as a starting material are known. Among these, since dehydrogenation is an endothermic reaction while oxidation reaction is an exothermic reaction, dehydrogenation is often adopted as the production method of aldehydes because thermal control of the reaction is easy. Accordingly, catalysts for dehydrogenation also have been studied.
For example, for the purpose of obtaining high-purity carbonyl compounds with a high yield by improving activity and selectivity, Patent Document 1 (JP 05(1993)-168928 A) discloses a dehydrogenation catalyst that includes, as a carrier, at least one kind selected from the group consisting of oxides and hydroxides of aluminum, silicon, titanium, zirconium, magnesium and iron, zeolite, and silica-alumina, wherein each metal has a specific atomic ratio.
For the purpose of producing aldehydes from alcohol with high selectivity, Patent Document 2 (JP 2010-99635 A) discloses a solid catalyst for synthesizing aldehydes through alcohol dehydrogenation. The catalyst includes copper as an active species, and a quantity of surface acid sites of the catalyst measured by a temperature-programmed desorption analysis of ammonia is 0.10 mmol/g or lower.